Google files first patent suit, against British Telecom

BT sued Google back in 2011, and the proverbial chickens are home to roost.

Search giant Google is nearly always on the defense when it comes to patent litigation. Last year, however, Google subsidiary Motorola filed suit against Apple over patents—part of the ongoing smartphone patent wars. Motorola has made patent claims against Microsoft as well.

Now, Google has filed what appears to be a patent infringement suit under its own name, against British Telecom. The British phone company sued Google over a year ago, alleging a wide range of Google products infringed its patents.

Google's patents cover various telephone networking technologies, such as "reserving system resources to assure quality of service" and "connection capacity reassignment in a multi-tier network." The patent numbers are 5,581,703, 5,701,465, 6,807,166, and 7,460,558. All four patents originated with other companies. Three are from IBM, and the '166 patent is a Fujitsu patent.

Companies fighting patent claims by filing their own infringement suits is quite commonplace. It gives a defendant more leverage by causing the patent aggressor to face the threat of a large damage claim, rather than just an invalidated patent.

The strategy doesn't work against so-called "patent trolls," however, since they have no real business to protect. But court records indicate that even in cases against foes with real businesses, such as Overture (which sued Google way back in 2002) and Skyhook (which sued Google in 2010), Google has not filed patent counter-suits.

"We have always seen litigation as a last resort, and we work hard to avoid lawsuits," a Google spokeswoman told Reuters when asked about the BT case. "But BT has brought several meritless patent claims against Google and our customers—and they've also been arming patent trolls."

That's apparently a reference to Suffolk Technologies LLC, a holding company that sued Google last year for patent infringement. One of its patents originated with British Telecom, according to Reuters.